Excellent Indie Double-Feature ("Death's Door" and "The Forgotten City")

Hello, and welcome back to another indie double-feature! As I always say at the start of these, I usually like to have some kind of theme tying all the games in the article together. Sometimes that theme is similar story concepts. Sometimes that theme is "I'm behind on my reviewing and happened to play these games recently." In the case of the two subjects of today's article, Death's Door and The Forgotten City, the theme is quality. Both of these games are excellent, so if you want to go into one or both of these as blind as possible, you can rest assured that both get a hearty recommendation from me. Let's not delay any longer!

Available for: Microsoft Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S

Reviewed for: Microsoft Windows

Death's Door is a game that was cautiously on my radar prior to its release. Sure, it looked compelling, but the look of the environments seemed like it could be a roguelike. As longtime readers know, I loathe the entire concept of the roguelike, and even though one ended up on spot #10 of my 2020 GOTY list, all my complaints about it were due to its very nature as a roguelike. So that was the only asterisk in my mind leading up to the release date, but you're reading my review, so despite being made by ultimately a handful of people, they clearly didn't take the easy way out game design-wise. In reality, Death's Door is part soulslike/part classic Zelda with a tiny sprinkling of bullet hell at times. In the world of the game, crows are immortals who work for the "reaping commission," and are tasked with harvesting the souls of the dead. If a crow fails to complete an assignment, then for one reason or another, they lose their immortality and will eventually die themselves. In case you haven't already figured it out from context clues, you play as one such little crow, and after a veteran crow who failed an assignment steals a soul from you, your only hope of regaining your immortality is to reap three "great" souls in order to open the titular Death's Door and retrieve your assignment (and that of the veteran crow) from beyond it. Like any good soulslike, the story isn't so much about the plot as it is the world and the lore, and while it isn't nearly as deep in Death's Door as it is in a From Software title, there's still plenty of interesting stuff to learn! Furthermore, the world is inhabited by charming characters that you'll likely come to love. If I had to bring up one complaint I have with the game world/characters/writing, that complaint would actually go hand-in-hand with a positive. See, despite the heavy subject matter of....you know...death, this isn't a grim, depressing kind of game. The world isn't breathing in a desperate final breath like in a Dark Souls title. The death thing kinda is what it is (more of a realistic take than a pessimistic, depressed one), so when a great soul is reaped, the moment is given the respect it requires, but all-in-all, Death's Door is actually pretty lighthearted. That's the positive side of the coin: the game treats death respectfully, but its overall tone is actually enjoyable. The negative side of the coin is that the humor it uses to build that enjoyable tone never really landed with me. Take, for instance, a character you meet early on: a man cursed to have a pot of soup for a head. The character's name? Pothead. It's a cute effort and I don't dislike it, but it didn't make me laugh. That's what I mean, so you can see that it's hardly the end of the world, but if I had to mention a complaint on the story/writing/characters side of things, that would be it.

Most opinions I've seen about Death's Door's gameplay tend to have a common theme: that it's not great, but it gets the job done. I'd agree, but I'd do so with a bit more love than I've seen. If you've played an isometric soulslike before, you probably know what to expect: you have a standard attack, a charged attack, and a dodge roll, and success lies in chaining these things together. But Death's Door adds another mechanic, which is magic (independent of a weapon, so not like it is in Dark Souls). You have four different spells to choose from, and each spell takes up a certain amount of magic charges. You start out with 4 charges and can upgrade the amount as the game progresses, so if you use the magic arrow (which takes up 1 charge), you can shoot up to 4 before having to get charges back. Thankfully, this isn't a system where you wait for your magic to recharge. Instead, this is the kind of system that always makes a game 100% better. You get one charge back for every melee attack you land (or every destructible item you break in the environment), so in order to utilize magic effectively, you have to actively engage in gameplay instead of cowering on the corners of the arena. Ever since Doom 2016, the "engage to survive" model of gameplay has been an instant gold star in my book, and I won't be making an exception for Death's Door just because there are some issues. This being an isometric action game, your view of combat can sometimes be obscured if you, say, end up on the other side of a boss or set of enemies. It isn't hard to get out of that situation and back in a position where you can clearly see everything, but it is an issue when it happens. Beyond the vision obscuring that happens because of the isometric view, I found that visual effects themselves sometimes obscured my vision at crucial moments. For instance, I was fighting a big armored guy, and I was using the bomb spell from afar to bait him into starting a charge so I could nail the dodge pattern I'd gotten used to. For some reason, I was no longer nailing that dodge pattern with this strategy, and eventually I realized that the visual effect of the bomb hitting the armor blocked my view of the enemy for just enough frames for him to start the charge and catch me unaware. So the problems with gameplay are relatively minor, and while this isn't the most revolutionary gameplay loop I've ever seen, it's always fun. That's because Death's Door nails one thing that not all soulslikes nail: the balance between tough and fair. The bosses in this game 100% demand that you learn their move patterns, but for even the hardest bosses, these move patterns are so well-telegraphed that it doesn't take that many attempts to learn them like the back of your hand. And once you think you've got it down to a science, after taking enough damage, each boss will ever-so-slightly switch things up. It's always a minor switch, like producing two projectiles after a jump attack you memorized that weren't there before, but they're enough to add just the slightest amount of tension and keep the battle from being too much of a walk in the park once you understand how the boss works. I think that's what makes me enjoy the gameplay here more than most folks I've heard opinions from: it really is the best "tough but fair" experience I've had in a soulslike in a long time.

Technically speaking, Death's Door is as solid as can be, which is astounding when you consider that the programming was done mainly by (I believe) two people, with the art side of things outsourced to talented artists outside the studio. I never experienced any framerate drops, crashes, animation glitches, audio glitches, or bugs of any kind. Furthermore, the art style of this game is great. I didn't use the word "beautiful" or "breathtaking," because it isn't really going for that. "Great" really is the best word for it. Now, the visual effects that sometimes obscure your vision in combat, on the other hand, are beautiful. Every explosion or spell cast is excellently lit and smoothly animated, so props to the artists responsible. As with all my other complaints about this title, the complaints I have on the technical side are pretty minor. See, the soundtrack for every area in this game is excellent. The ambient tracks carry a broad range of instrumentation (for example, the garden of the Urn Witch is mainly led by a flute...I think), while the boss battle themes are appropriately epic. The problem is that the soundtrack pieces are quite short...so if you're like me and you want to go and backtrack and explore to reach 100% completion, you're going to hear the same themes on loop hundreds upon hundreds of times. My only other complaint is that in the post-game, there are certain areas that have an owl you need to track down. The owl's noises are far too loud compared to the rest of the ambient noise. Yes. Those are my only two technical complaints. Folks, I don't know what more there is to say. Death's Door, from what I understand, has become a bit of an indie darling this year, and I'm giving it a full recommendation myself. So if you have a PC or one of the current or next-gen Xbox Models, please do yourself a favor and play Death's Door.

Let us review:

Vision issues in gameplay - 0.3

Technical issues - 0.1

The final score for Death's Door is...

9.6/10 - Nearly Perfect

Excellent work, Acid Nerve, excellent work

Available for: Microsoft Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Nintendo Switch (Q3 2021)

Reviewed for: Microsoft Windows

[Heads up, this one is going to be pretty disjointed because I have a lot of thoughts that I needed to get out in a condensed format]

"The many shall suffer for the sins of the one." This is the "golden rule" inscribed on the walls of the titular forgotten city, an ancient Roman ruin buried deep underground and filled with golden statues of people fleeing from some unknown terror. You are a modern day person who has just woken up on the bank of a river that flows by this ruin, and as you wake up, you're addressed by a stranger named Karen, who evidently saved your life. She tells you that a man named Al went into the ruins and he hasn't come back, so she asks if you'd be willing to go in and see if you can find him. After volunteering for the task, you end up falling through a trap door into the titular city and find the whole thing in ruins. Eventually, you stumble upon the corpse of an old man who hung himself, and an ancient roman tablet at his feet reveals that this is none other than the Al you were sent in to retrieve. In the tablet, Al talks of stumbling upon a portal into the past, but that once you go through, there's no way out, which is what eventually drove him to suicide. This being a videogame, though, rather than turn back and try to find a way out, you yourself end up going to that portal to the past and find yourself in the same city during its prime: 7 months after the fires in ancient Rome. Upon your arrival, the local magistrate sends for you, eager to explain the golden rule. He explains that if even one person in this city commits a single sin, all the inhabitants will be turned to gold. But the ruins suggest that a number of cultures have inhabited this city before eventually breaking this rule, so what god from what culture is responsible for this? What does the responsible god consider a sin? At the moment, those questions are interesting, but academic, for the Magistrate ends your conversation by mentioning he is responsible for the portal, and that if you're here, it can only mean somebody in the city is about to break the golden rule, thus necessitating him bringing you here from the future in the first place. If you can determine who is going to commit a sin and stop them before they do it, it will mean the portal never gets created, and you'll be flung back to your own time. From there, you set out into the city to meet the inhabitants, figure out what makes them tick, and try to determine what sin gets committed by who. If you tell me that that isn't an awesome idea for a story, I'm going to call you a liar. The Forgotten City started out as a mod for Skyrim, and it was so successful that it earned some kind of Australian Writers Guild award (the only game mod to ever do so). So, in the wake of that success, the developer of the mod assembled a team of about 4-5 people and spent the last 5 years turning the mod into its own game independent of The Elder Scrolls IP. Having now played the finished product, I can see why this would've been popular as a Skyrim mod, and I can even more clearly see how it would win a writer's guild award. The story, writing, characters, philosophical debate, historical accuracy, all of it is excellent. It's so excellent in fact that I'm having a hard time imagining how I'm going to keep this brief. So let me give one example that encompasses a few of those aspects. In your initial meeting with the magistrate, you have the option of mentioning that Roman customs are viewed as barbaric where you're from. For every barbaric Roman custom you bring up, the magistrate has an answer for it. If you bring up women having fewer rights, he brings up that they also don't get thrust into the brutal realities of the roman military. If you bring up debt bondsmanship, he brings up that it's no different from any other contract, etc. One that I found interesting was the option of asking "don't you persecute Christians?" I was definitely curious to see what the debatable ancient Roman philosophical answer to that was. But instead of a shaky but not illogical answer like I'd gotten to every other question, I got a scoff as he said something to the effect of "ah yes, the despicable cult that burned down half of Rome last year. What of them?" This whole conversation was an excellent marriage of legitimate philosophical quandry and the specific historical perspective that these characters would have had. That's but one of many examples of how the game leverages philosophy and historical accuracy to weave an interesting story. Gah, I really shot myself in the foot by making this part of a double-review, in hindsight. In the interest of keeping this brief, I'm going to jump around a bit. 

In my review of 12 Minutes, I briefly alluded to The Forgotten City specifically to talk about the effectiveness of each game's plot twists. Whereas the plot twist in 12 Minutes was terrible but couldn't be predicted from the beginning, you could conceivably predict the plot twist of The Forgotten City from the beginning, and it's actually good either way. I'm not going to spoil it, since I'm obviously recommending the game, but the plot twist on display here is the type of thing that I normally roll my eyes and groan over. But instead, as the revelation hit, I had goosebumps as I started going through all of my knowledge of the world in my head and making the connections. Instead of rolling my eyes, I was thinking "oh, wait, so that's...oh! And this guy's thing...ooooooh!" See, the key to a good plot twist isn't having it be unpredictable...it's having all the evidence deeply imbedded in the story plain as daylight in a way that the consumer doesn't notice until it's "too late," so to speak, so that once they've had the revelation, they can look back and go "OHHHH!" Just think about Bioshock, for instance. This game's twist isn't revolutionary like the one in Bioshock, but it's as well executed. 

Jumping around yet again, if Galerius (the first character you meet in the city) was the only character in the game, the character side of things would be an easy 10/10 for me. If Galerius was the only well-written character, it would still be an easy 10/10. But as it stands, Galerius is but the first of several excellent characters you'll meet in your investigation. You'll also meet the likes of Georgius: an immediately lovable, jovial Dionysian who believes that if you're going to turn to gold, you might as well look your best when you do. Then there's Desius, a shopkeeper who is such a comically greedy snake in the grass that somehow you can't help but smile when you talk to him. There's also Equitia, the priestess who says what has to be one of the best compassionate lines about another character I've heard in a long time. And of course, there's Duli, who has either an intellectual or developmental disability and is locked up because he just can't help but try to take things that he thinks are pretty, which makes him a potential walking golden rule time bomb. That's not even half of the cast of characters you'll get to talk to during your time in this city, and while certain characters are certainly stronger than others, it's an incredibly strong cast overall. I do have one complaint, though. The city is filled with characters from most of the major cultures of the time, and late in the game you meet a man who I would call a fundamentalist of one of those cultures. When you meet this character, he's having a bit of a breakdown because he's just seen evidence that his religious views might not be as true as he thought. My complaint is this: you're able to persuade him that it isn't a big deal way too easily. We aren't talking about some modern fundamentalist that you might be able the wriggle the theory of evolution into. We're talking an ancient fundamentalist who would skin you from head to toe for daring to suggest that the world isn't the dinner plate of the divine 15-eyed parrot god. Perhaps I view the ancient world as more backwards than it actually was, but I still had a hard time believing that this character was able to be calmed down from an extreme crisis of faith that might make him go postal with nothing more than Kumbaya talk. It obviously isn't a major complaint, but I legitimately found it unbelievable. 

Last thing on the story front: there are 4 endings you can get. 3 of them don't really matter, because the 4th one is the "canon" one. For the love of god, if you won't get this game and support this tiny development team for the excellent story, characters, and philosophical depth, get this game so that you can experience this ending in its full context. It's what I like to call a "hug yourself and smile" ending, the kind of thing that just makes you feel so good that you can't help but just melt from the positive feelings. No joke, one part of the canon ending actually made me start tearing up in a happy way. Before I start talking about gameplay and the technical side of things, I'd like to emphasize something here. Story used to be the most important part of any game to me. But then Doom 2016 came along and suddenly story stopped mattering to me if the gameplay was good. I stopped enjoying most RPGs because they weren't fast-paced enough, and my patience was no longer thick enough to wade through dialogue trees. So for me to not only enjoy a game like this, where the majority of your time is spent clicking through dialogue trees and talking to people, but play it upwards of 7 times to try and get all the achievements and find any stuff I missed should serve as a testament to the sheer quality of everything I've been discussing so far.

Gameplay in The Forgotten City is, as should come as no surprise, rather light. This being a time loop game like 12 Minutes (except good), gameplay largely centers around altering variables in the course of the day and seeing what the outcome is, then using your knowledge from these experiments to try something else in the next loop. Only, in this game you keep your inventory between loops, and at the start of each loop you have the option of having best character (and my best friend) Galerius handle certain things for you. Some have complained that these choices make success inevitable, but I say it just takes the frustrating parts of a time loop game out of the mix...and I believe that even more after 12 Minutes. This means that the game isn't really challenging, but the trade off is that you get to stretch your legs, explore, and try things out without fear. Another potential frustration of a time loop game that The Forgotten City mostly avoids is the feeling that you can't say or do what you want with the knowledge you've acquired. For the most part, I had even more options for how to use my knowledge than I would have necessarily thought of. If you read my review of 12 Minutes, you know that there were one or two instances where The Forgotten City did have this problem. For instance, I wanted to tell Galerius "hey...after X happens with you, could you do Y to keep soandso from doing Z?" to see what would happen. But having now experienced an actually restrictive time loop game, I'm willing to chalk those instances where I was a step ahead of the game up to the fact that no developer is ever going to be able to account for everything the player thinks up. Apart from the usual time loop stuff, there's also a couple of combat sections. The enemies you fight are never really a threat and you always have more than enough arrows for your bow, but as several people have said already, these sections do an excellent job of varying the pace of the game. Just when you might've been in the city talking for a bit too long, you might then stumble upon combat when you investigate a different lead, and just when you might've been doing combat for a bit too long, you reach the end and go back to talking. I can't say for sure if this superb pacing management was an intentional thing or not, but I can't argue with the results!

Now, this being a first game from a teeny tiny team, how does The Forgotten City fare on a technical level? Mostly well. The city itself is stunningly beautiful (especially if you're like me and you enjoy the whole ancient Roman/Greek aesthetic), I never had any crashes, and I never had any audio issues. On the other hand, the character models aren't great, I did experience a fair number of frame drops, and some of the dialogue sequences can be a bit buggy. Sometimes if you set one thing in motion too fast at the wrong time, for instance, characters might end up stuck in infinite loops saying the same thing over and over until you reload. Normally I would end up taking off more from the final score for this than I'm actually going to, but there's something I think should be kept in mind: This game...from a teeny tiny little development team...is less buggy than the game it started out as a mod for. So despite some issues, I've gotta say it's an impressive effort. Folks, in case I haven't been clear enough, I loved this game. It isn't the kind of thing I normally go for, and yet I still find myself picking it up to play more and see what little secrets I might have missed. It's evidently out on every console except the Switch so far, so I don't even have to mention the caveat of it being exclusive to x or y system like I did for Death's Door. So rather than say "if you have x," I'll say if you're into this hobby at all, you owe it to yourself to play through The Forgotten City.

Let us review:

Small technical issues - 0.2

The final score for The Forgotten City is...

9.8/10 - Nearly Perfect

Exceptional work, Modern Storyteller, exceptional work.